This post was inspired by events, friends, music, and my own personal opinions on all of those. It's named for a song titled "Where is The Love" by Black Eyed Peas, released in 2003, the lyrics to which can be found at this link. I heard it again recently on the radio and listening to the lyrics of it finally pushed me to attempt putting what I've been thinking to words. Where is the love?

Love is a very broad topic which one could go on for a lifetime discussing. One thing I'd like to quickly say about it though is when you love someone, tell them. It isn't just meant for significant others. Love is not only a very broad topic, but a broadly defined word as well . I tell my family members I love them, I tell my friends I love them, I even tell my dogs I love them. Every now and then, I tell my piano I love it. I know it's an inanimate object, but I'm not claiming to be entirely sane. Express yourself, especially when it's positive towards others.

People also don't seem to care enough about other people, the things in the world, and even our world itself in its entirety. From small things such as leaving a shopping cart out in the parking lot so that it rolls around and bumps into another car or blocks a parking space, up to someone taking the life of another person; what are we thinking?! As for killing someone, we'll try to justify that saying it was either self defense, punishment for a crime, or maybe an act of war. It's all crap. In self defense, if someone had the means to kill the person, then they should have also been able to injure them enough to temporarily disable them. The greater punishment for a crime is to let someone rot in a cell, alone, somewhere; not to kill them. Though I doubt it will ever happen, if everyone in the world could care enough about other humans and the fact that we all are indeed human, then we wouldn't need to act in violence towards each other.

One thing I really don't understand is bigotry. I really don't know what to say about it. I can't comprehend why someone can't at least just tolerate someone's race, religion, sexual preference, or whatever else. People don't have to agree with it, or like, but they also don't have to be prejudiced against it. That helps nothing.

I think we're all pretty messed up. What good is the supposed higher intelligence that we have over other creatures on this planet if we waste it on destroying ourselves and everything we see? I don't really know if we evolved from monkeys or not. That's another discussion. But think of this. Monkeys play in the trees and help each other out by picking and eating the bugs out of one another's hair. We evolved from that "up" to killing each other. So our intellect brought up from helping to killing. And not just killing ourselves, but killing an entire planet.

One well known line from Alexander Pope's poem An Essay on Criticism is "To err is human, to forgive divine." I want to take the part of "To err is human" out of context and ask is it also human not to fix our errors? It would seem so. Some people do actually seem to be making a good effort to fix the world's problems. Most, though, seem to still be unwittingly working against those efforts because they just don't care. What's the worst though is the people who are in a good position to help make things better, and they know they could, but they don't; and that's usually because of greed and/or fear.

I could probably be called out as a hypocrite in relation to several things I've said here. But my opinion on hypocrites: If what they say is good, listen; and if what they do is good, follow. Anything I've said here should't be new to anyone. It was pretty much just my opinions and not really all that informative. I could have given specific examples with current events, but you could also just go to Google News.

L2<3